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If you look at BHP's income statement, you see that it has

Cost of revenue -

Why does it have zero as cost of revenue? Forescue, their competitors, tell a different story.

What am I missing?

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It's a data problem. Google finance does list a Cost of Revenue, which is still different than their financial statements.

Note that BHP is an Australian company, so their financial reporting standards are different, wihch makes it more challenging to "normalize" them to the standard breakout that Yahoo uses.

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I don't believe presentation of a specific cost of goods breakdown is required, and in fact, allocating costs this way may result in significant and arbitrary judgement in a number of instances.

For example, Forescue (FMG) sell one product -- iron ore -- from a cluster of nearby assets in Western Australia. On the other hand, BHP is a mining conglomerate with diversified worldwide operations.

If you want to compare BHP's and FMG's iron ore efficiency, then a more apples to apples approach would be to review page 90 of the BHP 2017 annual report (section 1.13.3) which outlines iron ore specific income and asset items.

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    For reference, the BHP presentation form is called the ‘nature of expense’ method while the FMG method is known as the ‘function of expense’ method.
    – Peacock
    Commented Feb 10, 2018 at 14:23

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